


Vulture Capitalism

by Bard



Category: Kurosagi Shitai Takuhaibin | Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 02:53:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21845968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bard/pseuds/Bard
Summary: Vultures are industrious creatures that seek opportunity where others dare not.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 14
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Vulture Capitalism

**Author's Note:**

  * For [penitence_road](https://archiveofourown.org/users/penitence_road/gifts).



**TOKYO SHIMBUN**  
September 9, 2009

_NIRE'S BRIGHT NEW SKY_  
By Gin Fujita

SOME MEN might take offense at being compared to a vulture. Nire Atsushi laughs when I bring it up; he takes it as a compliment. Vultures, after all, are industrious creatures that find opportunity where others dare not. Before I can reassure him I’m not making the comparison, he slides out of his leather-backed chair, rummages through a drawer, and fans out a brochure across his desk, full of logos I recognize (and a few, in English, that I don’t). Cremation. Cryonics. Luxury Mummification. Living Trees…

“Living Trees?” I ask.

He settles back into his chair and describes, with great delight and no shortage of details, another developing business venture: alkaline hydrolysis. Using pressure and heat, his technicians render clients’ bodies down to an organic slurry using far less energy than an old-fashioned cremation. Americans typically pour the slurry down the drain, Nire explains, but—and here, he grins and leans across the desk—if you put it in a cornstarch box at the base of a sapling, the decedent drippings make excellent fertilizer. The tree lives on, and so, in a way, do Nire’s clients.

He offers to show me some photos of the hydrolysis chamber before, during, and after use. I politely decline, and try to return to my questions. True to form, Nire claws one last bit of life out of the conversational dead end:

“Of course, if you want to talk about vultures, I am looking into private Sky Burials in Tibet…”

“Sky,” fortunately, gives me a chance to return to what brought me to his office. I keep my eyes off the very colorful pictures in his brochure and refocus on the teacup he’s given me. Given the opulence of the room, I have no doubt the cup costs more than my digital recorder. “What I meant to say, Mr. Nire, is that some people compare you to a vulture living off carrion, and that’s why the New Sky renovation project is so surprising. What made you decide to move out of corpses and into architecture?”

He thinks about it a moment before answering, twiddling one of his trademark bangs between his fingers. “It’s true. I’ve spent a lot of time making a living with the dead. There’s no shame in that. I provide a valuable service to my clients and their families. But…after all this time, I figure, why not dabble a bit in resurrection?”

I have to hand it to him there: when you look past him to the window, taking in a skyline view from a floor that’s gone unused for nearly forty years, “resurrection” definitely feels apropos.

\--

In 2005, the only people you’d find in the New Sky Building’s lobby were architecture buffs mourning the death of Metabolism and the occasional gaijin with a digital camera and no respect for “KEEP OUT” signs. Now, the once-desolate hallway has been expanded and throngs with people. Painters line one bright blue wall, busily adorning it with wispy clouds and a cheerful sun; across from them, day laborers are installing padded benches. Nire leads me past it all at a brisk pace, pausing only to direct some delivery servicemen toward a maintenance door. I consider asking them for a quote, but the only sharp look from Nire I receive today—not to mention the inexplicable presence of a sock puppet on one delivery worker’s hand—warns me not to bother the employees.

Nire being Nire, of course he took us down from his top-floor office just to make us walk back up. It’s six flights up one of New Sky’s spiral stairways (expanded, but still cramped) that I finally ask why we didn't take the elevator.

“Oh, I wanted to see how long it would take you to notice.” Nire smiles over his shoulder and taps a fist against the stairway interior. The resultant knocking sounds nothing like knuckles on concrete. He continues, and I follow, running my fingers along the wall. Whatever he’s resurfaced it with feels familiar, but uncommon—

“It’s all bone.”

I shriek and yank my hand away before I realize he’s joking. Mostly. Reclaimed coffin wood, he explains; not every crematorium is as efficient as Nire Ceremony, and rather than let partially burned coffins go to waste, he sends crews around the prefecture, collects the wood, and converts it into wall coating. Turns out the charcoal’s great for freshening air in an otherwise ill-ventilated concrete tube. He makes sure to tell the tenants, and of course, it’s only in that one staircase.

For now.

I’m still a little unnerved as we exit the staircase onto the eighth floor, but any lingering sense of unease is swept away by the vision we step into. Every floor in the building used to be a cramped jumble of modular concrete rooms, but Nire, no doubt sticking to the resurrection theme, has converted this entire story into one building-sized grove. Fruit trees line the walls, rows of vegetables bloom along the floor-length picture window, and judging by a hulking man who’s strolling by in a hazmat suit, there must even be an apiary. Nire guides me to a bench in the center of it all, shaded from the solar lamps by tall ferns, and gestures for me to sit before turning to speak to the technician.

“You’ve outdone yourself on this one. The temperature is perfect. But make sure twenty-three runs a little hotter, okay?”

The technician gives a thumbs-up. I squint up at him. For a moment think I see bandages under the darkened visor, but he turns and marches off before I can be sure.

Nire thumps down in on the bench next to me, giving a contented sigh. “What do you think?”

I realize I’m writing his ad copy for him, but I can’t help myself: “This building is alive.”

“You’re more right than you realize.” He smiles and leans forward, steepling his fingers. “We’ve converted ten floors into green spaces just like this one, perfectly climate controlled. Five are dedicated to vertical farming, we’re considering turning the sixth into a small-scale chicken farm…”

“And the remaining four?”

His smile widens into a grin. “Floors twenty through twenty-four are for my own personal use.”

Most people wouldn’t renovate the most blighted building in Shinjuku and turn the top four floors into a private garden. Blowing that much money on climate control and giving up the apartment revenue? Absurd. But as Mr. Nire has demonstrated ably to me today, he’s not like most people. After all those years among the dead, who can blame him for reserving some floors for life?

He glances at his watch, tsks, and rises. It’s time for me to go. He leaves me in the garden with a firm handshake and a peach taken from one of the trees.

\--

Nire sank into his office chair and gave a wistful sigh. Interviews! Five years ago, any journalist who showed up at one of his businesses would be not-so-politely told to leave. But he needed this building. Not just for the revenue stream (although it was nice to get ongoing payments from clients who didn’t have century-long ice-encased leases), but for the privacy.

He hadn’t lied, not really. The four floors were perfectly climate controlled and for his own personal use. His, and any dying person, bereaved individual or researcher willing to pay up front and sign a confidentiality agreement. Where else in Japan could you find a forest with a locking front door? Or a desert? Or an apartment block with humidity and temperatures that varied from room to room, and none of them liable to get doors kicked in by police?

He had to thank The Atlantic Magazine, of all things, for the idea. He woke up his computer, pulled up the article, and read the headline again. "Down on the Body Farm." He was stunned no one else had thought of it. Those American universities were so short-sighted. Owning all that land, and they just let people leave bodies there _for free?_

__

__

But that was all right. Nire was always happy to find opportunities where others dared not go.

**Author's Note:**

> Body farms are very much a real thing, as is [that article in The Atlantic](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/12/down-on-the-body-farm-inside-the-dirty-world-of-forensic-science/67241/). I first read about them in Mary Roach's wonderful book [Stiff,](https://www.amazon.com/Stiff-Curious-Lives-Human-Cadavers-ebook/dp/B00421BN2C) but there's no shortage of articles about them, as well as a [podcast episode](https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-68-all-the-time-in-the-world/). 
> 
> The [Shinjuku New Sky building](http://www.michaeljohngrist.com/2009/04/new-sky-building-shinjuku/) is also real and sat mostly abandoned until a renovation in 2010. In Kurosagi's universe, Nire has purchased and expanded it in order to monetize decomposition research (I'm sure somebody in Japan thrills to the idea of their body decaying in a desert), but in reality, it was renovated in 2010 and houses a mix of apartments, businesses, and shops. 
> 
> [Alkaline hydrolysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkaline_hydrolysis_\(body_disposal\)) is a neat form of body disposal; unfortunately, several fuddy-duddy American states frown on the practice and the Catholic church (which only recently accepted cremation) considers reduction to goop a violation of the dignity of the human body. Still, it's growing in popularity, and who knows? I might decide to become a tree someday.
> 
> Thank you for requesting this fandom! Not only did it teach me about an entire forgotten school of architecture, it also gave me an excuse to reread one of my favorite manga. Happy holidays!


End file.
